sunday dinner
by thewordsthatweareneeding
Summary: The first real Sunday dinner Cammie and her mom have after her return from Rome, because I have a giant soft spot for mother-daughter bonding. Set during OSOT. Contains spoilers for OSOT.


******A/N: I've been really dissatisfied with the amount of Gallagher girls fanfiction (or lack thereof) I've come across so far, so I thought I would do my part to contribute. Here, have a mother-daughter consolation drabble.**

Cammie Morgan sat in her mother's office, the smell of some horribly prepared meal wafting throughout the room. She wanted to suggest they eat food from the kitchens, just that one time, but she knew without having to ask that it was important to her mom to maintain a sense of normalcy. That was why she was there in the first place, for their weekly mother-daughter dinner just as she had done for years. They could not skip a week. They could not order food. They could not sit and talk and cry together. Not even if Cammie's hair was shorter or if her arms were marred with scars that she could not remember getting, or if her uniform hung loose on her bone-thin frame. Not even if her father had gone from missing to dead, and his remains were in a CIA facility, and she had sat at his grave and clawed at the ground until her fingers were purple from the cold and brown from the mud and red from the blood oozing from skin torn in her desperation.

"Almost ready, sweetheart," Rachel Morgan called.

Cammie nodded although she knew her mother could not see her. Her fingers unthinkingly traced the grooves in the wood table. If she closed her eyes, she could see the initials engraved into the cabin floor, both the initials she did not remember carving and the initials she knew her father had carved. She kept her eyes wide, trained on a point in front of her, without seeing it. She hummed the tentative melody of a song she could not name, without hearing it.

When her mother walked in, Cammie spoke without thinking. "How did you and Dad meet?"

The words were familiar on her tongue. She had spoken them before. That, she remembered. But they felt weighted in a way they had not been the first time. The question felt like a gun in her throat, locked and loaded, and it reminded her of the rifle she held in CoveOps; it did not scare her because it was dangerous; it scared her because it made her feel dangerous.

Fortunately, her mother was never one to shy away from danger. "I'll tell you, as soon as you have the clearance."

It was the same answer to the same question, but Cameron Morgan was not the same girl she had been at the beginning of the summer. Every morning she woke up and tried to pull her hair into a ponytail before remembering it was not long enough. Every breath she took, she felt her ribs rising and pushing against her skin. Every movement she made, some part of her that was sore or bruised or bloody screamed in protest. Every day, she felt less and less like an operative, and more and more like a scared teenage girl. And while operatives might be capable of accepting the coded, cryptic promises a spy like her mother offered, a scared teenage girl could never. A scared teenage girl needed answers, and above all, she needed her mother.

"No," her voice was hoarse, her throat raw. "I need to know…I need to know_something."_

_"_Sweetheart, you know I can't tell you, even if I want to."

Her mother smiled sadly and for a moment, Cammie hated herself for putting her mother in that position, for making her feel guilty for something that was not her fault. Rachel Morgan wanted answers every bit as much as her daughter did, but Rachel Morgan would never allow herself to be anything less than strong while her daughter was falling apart.

"He's dead, Mom. I was at the safehouse they held him in. I was at his grave. He's never coming home," she sounded more unsteady than she had ever allowed herself to sound in the past. "Tell me something about him. Anything. Even if you have to lie."

Rachel did not hesitate to pull her daughter into her arms and holding her firmly. Cammie buried her head into the crook of her mother's neck and allowed herself to tremble, to hug her mother, to let down her defenses for the first time in a long, long time.

After a moment, Rachel tucked a strand of hair behind Cammie's ear and gently said, "We met in college."

Cammie froze for a moment before hugging her mother tighter. The image of her mother, young and beautiful and lost on a college campus, meeting her father for the first time played in her mind. It made her smile, even though she knew, her mother had never gone to college. Even though she knew, the timeframe was off. Even though she knew, it was a lie, and not a particularly good one at that. The simple sentence was enough to allow her to pretend, just for a moment, that she was safe, that she was normal, and that everything was going to be okay. And that was all she wanted.


End file.
